As if there weren't already enough gizmos and gadgets pushing society further into its sedentary lifestyle, now PepsiCo have created a new product that takes the hard work — chewing — out of eating.

Targeting mums who want to get their children to eat more fruit and vegetables, the Tropicana division of PepsiCo is launching Tropolis snack pouches for market testing in the US Midwest this month. Tropolis pouches contain a mix of fruit pulp and juice with no artificial colours, flavours or added sugars or high fructose corn syrup, containing 336 kilojoules per pouch.

PepsiCo is promoting Tropolis as a healthy snack alternative, but a professor of nutrition in New York told the Wall Street Journal there are hidden sugars in the new product.

The product's listed ingredients include puree, fruit juice and fruit concentrates — but the fruit concentrates are simply sugar, Professor Marion Nestle said.

"They start out with real food, so let's give them credit for applesauce and mashed-up bananas," Nestle told the Wall Street Journal, "the rest of it is sugar. Kids would be better off eating an apple or a banana."

In Pics: Healthy snacks

Unfortunately mashed-up fruit in squeezable pouches is not where it ends. PepsiCo's chairman and CEO, Indra Nooyi, is looking to build the company's "good for you" product portfolio from US$10 billion to US$30 billion by 2020, and liquefied snacks removing the need for chewing seem to be key to achieving this growth.

"We see the emerging opportunity to 'snackify' beverages and 'drinkify' snacks as the next frontier in food and beverage convenience," Nooyi said in a media statement following PepsiCo's purchase of a 66 percent stake in Russian food producer Wimm-Bann-Dann late in 2010.

Who knows what food combinations — or further butchering of the English language — PepsiCo will release on the market, especially following comments by the company's head of nutrition, Dr Mehmood Khan, who said it was "outdated" to separate food into wet and dry categories.

"Consumers don't wake up in the morning and say, 'I'm going to have a wholegrain. I want a dairy product'," Dr Khan told the Wall Street Journal. "They're looking for combinations of those things."

Movies, cartoons and television shows have often hinted that in the future we'll be eating all of our food in pill form, with all texture, flavour, preparation and any form of effort removed. Is PepsiCo moving us one step closer to this as a reality? Would you like to "eat" a meal-in-a-can liquefied drink?